The essays here work toward a more sophisticated social history of colonialism, concentrating on the eighteenth century and running from roughly 1700 to the close of the Age of Revolutions in the 1830s.

Their method is to read legal practice and litigation across the French colonial world, in its Atlantic as well as its Oceanic reaches, in order to question an assumption that has come to seem natural: that law and empire amount to the same thing, with doctrine and codified procedure formed in the metropolis and then transmitted outward to the colonies. Against that, the contributors treat state authority as unsteady and open to challenge, and offer new approaches to writing the history of the French empire.

The volume also addresses a gap. France's first colonial empire has drawn far less scholarly and theoretical attention than its imperial forms after 1830, and the book positions itself as a corrective.